A Case of Redemption (29 page)

I was still thinking about how that would play out, and whether it was even possible to convince L.D. not to testify, when Nina got out of bed. Still naked, she walked over to me, not the least bit self-conscious. When she knelt beside me to kiss the back of my neck, I could feel the softness of her breast along my back.

Her hand started at my chest, but in no time it was beneath the elastic on my pajama bottoms. For a moment I wasn't sure if this was because she'd convinced me with regard to our trial strategy, or if she thought I needed a little more encouragement.

Either way, it was enough for me to forget anything about the opening.

T
he next day, we all waited forty minutes before Judge Pielmeier took the bench. She welcomed the gallery back, and then called for the guards to bring in the defendant. That's what she always called L.D.—the defendant.

L.D. entered wearing the same exact suit, shirt, and tie as the day before. Nina leaned over to me. “Let's remember to bring him a new tie tomorrow.”

After L.D. took his seat, and the guards took theirs behind us, Judge Pielmeier called for the jury. To a person, they looked dead tired. Yesterday was exciting, the whole waiting-to-be-selected thing, but now, even before the trial had begun, they looked no different from anybody else at the start of a workweek.

When the jury was ready, Judge Pielmeier went through the standard pretrial speeches. First she explained that L.D. was innocent until proven guilty, offering a circular explanation of reasonable doubt.

“It doesn't mean ‘no doubt,' ” she said, “but it also doesn't require that you be certain of the defendant's guilt. The standard is that if you have doubts that are
reasonable
as to whether the defendant is guilty, you must vote not guilty.”

After that, she instructed the jurors that they should consider as evidence only what the witnesses said. “Now, these lawyers, they're smart and they know all the tricks, but not one of them knows anything about this case except what other people have told them.
And guess what, that's what you'll know, too, after the evidence. So my instruction to you is this: listen to the lawyers, but understand that what they tell you should only be used as a road map showing the evidence that is about to come up. And like any road map, it should only serve as a guide. Don't let it overrule your eyes and ears and good judgment. If one of the lawyers tells you something is true, but none of the evidence supports that conclusion, then you should not believe it, any more than you should keep going on a road that you can see out your windshield is a dead end. Which is a long way of saying, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, trust your own judgment.”

The jurors nodded in unison, which was enough for Judge Pielmeier to get down to business. “Ms. Kaplan,” the judge said, “we're ready to hear your opening statement.”

Kaplan walked in front of the jury, introduced herself as “Assistant District Attorney Lisa Kaplan, representing the people of the state of New York,” and then walked back to counsel table and sat down. She waited long enough to build some suspense, but not so long as to allow anyone's mind to wander. Then she pressed a button on the laptop beside her.

L.D.'s voice blared through the courtroom's speakers:

Gonna stop you when you sing,

gonna give it til you scream;

don't like what you said,

gonna go A-Rod on your head.

Then the music came to a dead halt.

All eyes were on Kaplan, and she milked it but good. She didn't move, remaining in her seat for about ten seconds, and then, still without saying a word, walked in front of the jury as deliberately as she had before.

Once she was facing them again, she repeated the lines, somehow
managing to make them sound even more frightening than when L.D. rapped them.

“Gonna stop you when you sing,

gonna give it til you scream;

don't like what you said,

gonna go A-Rod on your head.

“This isn't a confession,” Kaplan said. “Confessions come after the crime. This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was a threat—a threat of murder, made by the defendant”—she pointed at L.D., just like they teach you on the first day of ADA school—“Nelson Patterson, aka Legally Dead. Then, when he didn't like what Roxanne said, Legally Dead made good on that threat by brutally bashing in Roxanne's beautiful face. In other words, he went A-Rod on her head.”

Kaplan told the jury there were some things about which there could be no doubt, so much so that not even the defense—and then she pointed at me—would claim otherwise. Among these indisputable facts, Kaplan included that Roxanne and L.D. were lovers, that L.D. had written a song in which he bragged about beating to death a singer with a baseball bat, and that Roxanne was a singer who was murdered by being beaten to death with a baseball bat.

“These facts,” she said, “leave no doubt that Legally Dead murdered Roxanne. No doubt.”

Then she played the audio again, to emphasize her point.

Gonna stop you when you sing,

gonna give it til you scream;

don't like what you said,

gonna go A-Rod on your head.

I figured that was going to be her closing flurry, but as Kaplan made her way back to the counsel table, John
Something-or-Other, the bald guy second-seating her, handed her a baseball bat.

“Objection!” I shouted, mindful of Judge Pielmeier's admonition not to say more than one word.

“Overruled,” she replied without even asking me to state the grounds.

Kaplan then showed me how formidable an adversary she would be. Picking up on the fact that the jury undoubtedly didn't follow what had just occurred, she put herself in the role of their friend.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Sorensen objected because, as our witnesses will explain to you later, the murder weapon in this case has not been found. Legally Dead was way too clever to leave behind something that would link him to this crime. But you'll hear that Roxanne was given a baseball bat as a gift when she sang our national anthem at the first game of the World Series, a bat signed by the players on both teams. Roxanne kept that bat in her bedroom, and it was there on the last day of her life. And you'll hear that when the police arrived after her death, it was gone, and it has never been found. And, of course, the song clearly threatens a brutal beating with a baseball bat. But, ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the day, it matters very little what weapon killed her. Certainly it didn't matter to Roxanne. No, what matters, what you must always remember when you're hearing evidence, is that the last moments of Roxanne's life involved her being violently struck by a powerful object until her body could no longer withstand the blows.”

She walked over to the jury box, holding the bat in her hand. I knew what she was going to do and my mind raced through the possible objections I could make. None seemed to apply and my quick calculation was that by saying anything, I'd only make things worse.

“Just imagine,” Kaplan continued, now only inches away from the jury foreperson, “what that must have been like for Roxanne. There she was, alone in her bedroom with the man she had been intimate with, and he stood over her holding a baseball bat.” Kaplan raised the
bat over her head, and as she did, each juror's eyes pointed toward the bat. “And then Roxanne saw that weapon come crashing down on her,” and with that Kaplan struck the wooden rail hard enough to make the jurors jump back.

Pure theatrics, but my God, was it effective.

•   •   •

“Let's start with the name,” I said when it was my turn.

Once Nina and I had decided not to come clean about L.D.'s birth name, we'd still had to figure out what we were going to call him. We were fairly confident that the prosecution would call him Legally Dead, unless they could pin some other, more offensive, moniker on him. I gave some thought to asking Judge Pielmeier to require the prosecution to refer to him as Mr. Patterson, a tactic often used in mob cases when the defense doesn't want the defendant referred to as Johnny the Rat or Jimmy the Axe, but I ultimately concluded that the jury would find it disingenuous to portray L.D. as someone different from the man they'd read so much about in the news. I also doubted that Judge Pielmeier would rule in our favor.

“You heard Ms. Kaplan refer to our client over and over again as Legally Dead. But that's just a stage name. Like Lady Gaga or Pink or Eminem. No one actually calls him Legally Dead in real life. His friends call him L.D., and that's what we're going to call him.

“I'd be the first to admit that his lyrics are often harsh, but even hip-hop artists fall in love,” I told the jury, trying to wax poetic. The reference to L.D. as a hip-hop artist, rather than as a rapper, was deliberate, our attempt to conjure a softer image, more Drake or Bruno Mars than 50 Cent. “L.D. loved Roxanne, and for that simple reason, no one wants justice for Roxanne more than he does. But there can be no justice for Roxanne unless L.D. is found not guilty. He is innocent of this horrible crime, and the only way Roxanne's murderer will be brought to justice is if you find L.D. not guilty.”

I went through the mirror opposite of Kaplan's opening, listing the evidence that wasn't there. “Keep focused on what the prosecution
cannot prove,” I said, trying my best to suggest that something sinister was afoot. “The prosecutor, Ms. Kaplan”—and then I did the pointing thing right back, extending my arm in Kaplan's direction—“is going to ask you to
assume
all sorts of things. But assumptions aren't facts or evidence. So don't be tricked by them.

“The biggest assumption the prosecution is going to ask you to make is also the most unfounded, and that's about the song Ms. Kaplan played for you. She says it's about Roxanne, but what evidence does she have for that? Zero. Nada. Zilch. The truth is, it's just a song. It doesn't reflect L.D.'s innermost feelings. Do you think Elvis really owned blue suede shoes? Did the Beatles really all live in a yellow submarine? These are made-up stories set to music. So is the song that Ms. Kaplan played for you. It's a work of brutal fiction.”

The last five minutes of my opening were all SODDI. But I followed Nina's advice, not once naming Brooks as our SODDI guy, just in case we needed to go in a different direction after we saw the evidence.

“If L.D. did not commit this crime, then who did?” I said, my voice rising. “If I were sitting where you are, that's what I'd want to know. After all, we've all watched enough cop shows to know that the boyfriend is suspect number one, right? But what if there was more than one boyfriend? The prosecution doesn't want you to know about Roxanne's
other
lover. Ms. Kaplan never said a word about that, now, did she? But the evidence will tell you that. The evidence says that loud and clear. We'll show you evidence that several pubic hairs were found in Roxanne's bed that could not possibly have come from L.D. Those pubic hairs came from a Caucasian, and that Caucasian was in Roxanne's bed right before she was murdered. Maybe even on that very day. So . . . who was it?”

I stopped and tried to make eye contact with each juror before going on. Some of them looked away, but most of them didn't.

Benjamin Ethan called it the nod poll. “If I get a nod during opening statements, that juror is mine through deliberations,” he'd say.
Kaplan had a few nods during her opening, but she would ultimately need twelve votes to convict. So far I had maybe one headshake, but no nods.

“What do we know about Roxanne's
other
lover?” I said. “One thing we know for sure is that the police didn't do anything to find him. Another thing we know for sure is that this man didn't come forward to publicly acknowledge that he'd been in Roxanne's bed, perhaps as recently as the day she was murdered.”

I stopped, offering the jury another dramatic pause.

“Why didn't the police find him? They had his pubic hairs and possibly his fingerprints, and yet they did nothing to locate him. Why? Again, the answer is simple. It's because the police had already arrested L.D., and so they didn't want the embarrassment of admitting that they were wrong. And why didn't this man come forward on his own accord? If you were in a relationship with someone who was killed shortly after you'd been naked in their bed, wouldn't you come forward? Wouldn't you realize that you might have critical information to share with the police?” Another pause. “You already know why he didn't do that, don't you? The man who shared Roxanne's bed that last time did not come forward for one reason and one reason only: he's the man who murdered her.”

And there it was. Two jurors nodded.

T
he prosecution's first witness was a police detective named Boyle. He was a big, burly Irishman with doughy features and a ruddy face. The prototypical grizzled cop straight out of central casting. Just one look at him made you think he was the kind of guy you'd want to buy a beer and hear his stories because you knew he'd pretty much seen it all.

Kaplan made sure the jury knew that Boyle didn't just look the part.

“How many years have you been a police officer, Detective Boyle?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Is this your first murder investigation?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Your second?”

“No, ma'am. Far from it.”

“How many murder cases have you handled, Detective?”

“I'm sorry to say, it's been thirty-seven.”

“Anyone on the NYPD handle more murder cases than you?”

“I don't know for a fact, ma'am, but I've never met a cop who has.”

Kaplan turned away from her witness and toward the jury. She smiled, and held the pose when I caught her eye.